Scott Walker: Bish Bosch – review

Saturday 1 December 2012 19.04 EST
First published on Saturday 1 December 2012 19.04 EST

As befitting an album released in December, there is a seasonal song at the end of Bish Bosch, the latest work by Scott Walker. Bells jingle all the way. The Day the "Conducator" Died marks Christmas in an unorthodox fashion, however. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, known as the "Conducator", was executed by firing squad on Christmas Day, 1989. "Nobody waited for 'fire'," intones Walker of the marksmen's enthusiasm. The reindeer bells, it turns out, are a death knell.

The Day the "Conducator" Died is one of the more immediate songs on Bish Bosch – an opaque work in which a former romantic hero, Scott Walker, embarks on a nine-song cycle filled with historical disgust, allegorical density and bad jokes, all tied together by a melodramatic tone that dovetails the cerebral with the scatological. Warm and cosy it isn't.

It isn't meant to be, but that's not the most pressing issue here. Walker, now 69, has been operating somewhere between chanson and the avant garde for some years now, having infamously turned his back on the heartbroken crooning of his first 60s incarnation with the Walker Brothers. He's moving in the company of fellow prickly sound sculptors Lou Reed and John Cale, but very much on his own tangent. Bish Bosch more or less completes a trilogy inaugurated by Tilt, from 1995, and The Drift, which came out in 2006; it's possibly the most difficult, but the most fully artistically realised, of the three.

Bish Bosch is best enjoyed as an act of intense pop meta-fiction, a work, rather than a set of tunes. Walker's orchestrations are cinematographic; punk and metal incursions swap with melodic passages and austere arrangements. The space between the instruments, and Walker's voice, is often eloquent in itself. He toys with language, references and unconventional instrumentation. Given time and application, his lyrical riddles offer a series of rabbit holes down which to disappear, tongue-tied. "Epicanthic knobbler of ninon," he offers, sonorously, on Corps De Blah, "arch to Macaronic mahout in the mascon". There are dog barks and ram's horns here, too, and machetes being sharpened at the start of Tar.

The record's notional single, Epizootics!, meanwhile, features the insistent fart of a tubax, a sax-tuba cross; the video, beautifully shot, brings to life finger-clicking rhythms redolent of 50s jazz. When a fanfare accompanies Walker's exclamations, it's a glorious moment, like the Christmas lights all coming on.

Elsewhere, though, there are bridges too far. The album's 21-minute centrepiece, SDSS14+13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter), notionally draws parallels between two brown dwarves: one, a cool sub-stellar body, and the other, a court jester for Attila the Hun. If I'm understanding correctly, it's a piece about attempted transcendence (flagpole-sitting was an endurance fad of the American 20s). But there is no anchor here, or even coherence; no emotion in a piece which seeks to address folly with pity, if not compassion.

On a technical level, Walker's redeployment of his natural baritone to its upper limits can be intriguing; the transposition leaches it of warmth. Walker is much more interested in how the beauty of his voice can serve declamation and confrontation; but you sometimes recoil from this mannered anti-croon.

There's no satisfactory resolution to the boom-tish of the title, either. Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights famously depicts humanity as violent and bestial; Walker's with him on that. But the "bish" here is a bitch, and Walker would like us to understand that he is tilting at some "universal female artist". Really, it's just the most regrettable pun.